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Arma 3 requires Valve's Steam to play

Bohemia Interactive has revealed that Valve’s Steam will be required to play Arma 3.

In a developer's blog post, Project Lead Joris-Jan van ‘t Land explains that due to a difficult phase in the game's development, including the recent incident in Greece, the team was forced to re-evaluate the project, and saw that Steam was one step it needed to get Arma 3 back on track for release in 2013.

“As an independent developer, we’re constantly evaluating the way we develop, distribute and publish games. Valve made tremendous improvements to their system, which made the installation/update process much more user-friendly - for both developers and customers“ adds Bohemia Interactive’s founder and CEO, Marek Spanel.

“We realize that some people may find it difficult to migrate to a new platform, especially if they were used to purchasing and playing our games without any external third-party application. We have evaluated the pros and cons, but in the end Steam enables us to release Arma 3, brings massive advantages to the game, and improves the end-user experience. Not to forget, the majority of our players already come from Steam.“

Bohemia Interactive is also exploring the further integration of Steamworks functionality, which will enable game features that the team couldn't get done in time.

“Valve’s Steamworks offers some cool features that can help us to enhance the Arma experience where it matters. We’ll save the exact details for a later update, but to summarize our priorities in two key words: user-generated content and multiplayer.” said Joris-Jan van 't Land.